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THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION

~ Science, logic, and ethics, from a Whiteheadian Pragmatist perspective (go figure)

THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION

Category Archives: Whitehead

Book Sale

13 Wednesday May 2020

Posted by Gary Herstein in Process Philosophy, Whitehead

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Process Philosophy, Whitehead

Taylor/Francis (Routledge) is having a sale on electronic versions of the book I coauthored (and which this blog is named after) The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead’s Radical Empiricism. The note from Routledge reads as follows:

(W)e’re running a monograph sale through June 11th. Readers can now access your book free-of-charge for seven days. At the end of the trial period, they’ll have the opportunity to purchase the eBook for £10/$15.

https://tfstore.kortext.com/the-quantum-of-explanation-215103 (EPUB version)

https://tfstore.kortext.com/the-quantum-of-explanation-199954 (PDF version)

While I am obviously biased, many people who are not me also think that it is a very good book — indeed, one of the most important contributions to Whitehead scholarship in the last few decades. Many books in the secondary literature get Whitehead wrong; if you read our book, you’ll have some idea just how wrong. But in addition, Quantum will (ideally) provide you with essential insights into Whitehead’s magnum opus, Process and Reality, so that you might see for yourself why this latter book is such a revolution in thinking for the Western tradition. I’m not making any money off of this sale, and the price being asked by Routledge is pretty nearly unbeatable. So I encourage you to check it out!

quantum-of-explanation

Making Sense

12 Monday Feb 2018

Posted by Gary Herstein in General Philosophy, Inquiry, Logic, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science, Process Philosophy, Whitehead

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Logic, Metaphysics, Process Philosophy, Whitehead

Whitehead set out to make sense of things. After witnessing all of his attempts to point out how Einstein’s general theory of relativity failed to make the sense it claimed to make (and still fails to do so, but the model centrists won’t permit empirical evidence to get in the way of their clever mathematics), he arguably decided that he needed to step back from epistemology and philosophy of science, to present a more logically primary argument, in the metaphysical form of his “philosophy of organism.” Whitehead centered his argument on what I and Randy Auxier named “the quantum of explanation,” a logical (rather than ontological) center, around which Whitehead constructed his subtle and complex system of making sense. It has been suggested that Whitehead’s magnum opus, Process and Reality, is one of the five most difficulty works in the Western philosophical canon. I’m not inclined to argue with such a sentiment, since the most that could be credibly argued is that it might be knocked back to sixth place. For my part, I’m not sure what work could manage that feat.No Sense

One of the points that Randy and I tried to emphasize was that the process of “making sense” was itself a rather complex process, in which the most active word in the proceeding is process: this is not an object you hold, but an activity you engage in. So despite my habitual focus upon contemporary science &/or concerns, this is actually as classic an issue as you can find in the Western philosophical canon. (And I just don’t have the expertise to speak with even casual ignorance about the Eastern canon, a source of inestimable insight and subtlety. I am, however, inclined – ignorant as I am – to suspect that what I have to say here can find its analogs in that tradition.) Continue reading →

Subject, Object, Person

06 Tuesday Feb 2018

Posted by Gary Herstein in Logic, Personhood, Process Philosophy, Whitehead

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Personhood, Process Philosophy, Whitehead

“Personalism” is the philosophical position that the first principle in any approach to the world must be that of “person.” Given the habits we have inherited over the years from our scientific (scientistic?) approaches to reality, this might seem like a hopelessly subjective approach to things. But such an attitude is wrong on at least two accounts: first, personalism is NOT the same as “subjectivism” – not by a long shot! The second major flaw is that there is nothing at all “hopeless” about it; indeed, there is a case to be made for its logical necessity. This last point is open to dispute to a degree that the first is not, and I’ll be focusing on this point a bit. Toward the end of this post, and in fulfillment of my priority to keep things Whiteheadian on this blog, I’ll gloss a few areas where Whiteheadians and personalists disagree, and the major point where they overlap. (Spoiler: Whitehead was not a personalist.)

Bluesy

I’ve no idea what picture to use for this post, so here is a picture of my cat, “Bluesy,” who is neither subject nor object, but rather person.

A point of terminology: if, along the way, I have cause to use the term “objectivism,” it should be clearly understood that I am not in any way, shape, or form, referring fatuous pretensions to philosophy. I am merely using the word as a modified form of “objective,” to discuss such forms of emphasis that focus upon the “outer as outer;” a similar caveat holds with respect to the terms “subjective” and “subjectivism.” Continue reading →

Nature versus Naturalism

29 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by Gary Herstein in General Philosophy, Logic, Metaphysics, naturalism, Philosophy of Science, Process Philosophy, Whitehead

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naturalism, Process Philosophy, Science, Whitehead

Nature is that which is studied by physical science. Saying as much does not answer many questions; most particularly, it tells us neither what nature nor science happen to be, only that they are connected as inquiry and thing inquired into. That being said, one can also notice that it is necessary to have some notion or concept of what it is that one is inquiring into, in order for that inquiry to have any sort of systematic or methodologically sound structure. Absent such a concept, inquiry loses any possibility of systematicity, and instead becomes nothing more than random shifting around and arbitrary clutching at straws. Such shifting and clutching will, ideally, eventuate in a more systematic concept of the topic being inquired into, at which point inquiry “moves into a new gear,” and begins to become genuinely organized. Physical science has long since moved past such a phase of randomly poking things with a stick; it has long been operating with a detailed and thoroughly developed concept of nature. But while the sciences have A concept of nature, does that mean they have the best concept of nature? There are reasons to believe that the answer to this question is “no.”Nature

This brings us to the philosophical question of naturalism. Some forms of naturalism take the position that “nature is all there is,” which might seem like a fairly strong metaphysical commitment until one realizes that saying, “nature is all there is,” tells us nothing about what all nature is. So in order to have any cognitive content, any and all forms of naturalism – regardless of whether or not they admit the possibility of anything beyond nature – must, primarily, be a thesis about what nature is. So a form of naturalism will be the source of a concomitant concept of nature. I will state without argument that the two stand in a one-to-one relationship: if “a” form of naturalism resulted in a “family” of concepts of nature, then in reality what we would have is a family of forms of naturalism as well – one member of this latter family for each concept in the former. Continue reading →

Process Philosophy and Process Theology

17 Friday Nov 2017

Posted by Gary Herstein in Logic, Process Philosophy, Process Theology, Whitehead

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Process Philosophy, Process Theology, Whitehead

Talk about “God” makes numerous appearances in Whitehead’s metaphysical magnum opus, Process and Reality (PR hereafter), which is a source of histrionic consternation for some and febrile enthusiasm for others. I’ll not name names, but anyone familiar with the secondary literature will likely have some notion of persons fitting each description. I think it is a fair assessment to say that, within the United States, the Whitehead scholarly community is dominated by the theologians. (Very cursory and unscientific impressions of the European and Asian communities suggests the situation is quite otherwise in those regions.) This unbalanced view of things tends, I suspect, to narrow the range of application of process thought, and unduly limit its potential and legitimate influence. Also, being a process philosopher, it just kind of pisses me off. It’s like going to your favorite bar or club, and even though there are over 800 songs in the jukebox, only 12 of them are ever allowed to be played. Never mind that they might be 12 really good songs. If the only album I was ever allowed to listen to – ever again – was Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run, I’d give up listening to music in pretty short order; after a while, you just want to hear something else.Fractal Nautilus

Please make no mistake here: I am in no way disdaining either theology or, specifically, process theology. But philosophy is different from theology, and even when philosophers use “The G Word” they are using it differently from theologians. And Whitehead’s usage was strictly philosophical in nature. So the theological developments of Whitehead’s thoughts on the subject are just that: developments. And there is absolutely no reason why such developments should be eschewed. But neither should those developments be taken for that primary matter, either. I am not going to revisit the discussion of the G-word here, that I covered in the post hyperlinked above. But there are some specific issues relating to contemporary Whitehead scholarship in America that might, in their discussion, suggest ways in which process philosophy is relevant to a broader audience.

To begin with, while Whitehead uses the word “God” with some frequency in PR, there is almost nothing in that book that could support a religious or theological sense of the term. For Whitehead, “God” is the term that designates the rational order of the universe coupled with the font of creativity and origination. There is nothing even remotely personal about it in this usage. It is only on the basis of how people choose to interpret a few sentences in the last section of the last (and quite short) chapter of the entire book, that Whitehead’s work gets stretched into a theological thesis. And even here, there is scarcely any foundation for viewing this “God” as a person. Some of this extravagance comes from Whitehead’s previous usages of words like “experience” and “feeling” to characterize the most primitive forms of relatedness possible (more on Whitehead’s choice of terms in a moment). An electron interacting with a magnetic field “feels” that field; but there is nothing cognitive or conscious in that “feeling.” It simply indicates how the electron is embedded in the universe as an “electronic occasion.” Similar care needs to be exercised with Whitehead’s use of the word “God,” especially if one’s intention is to stay true to Whitehead’s ideas, rather than engaging in novel developments. There is nothing wrong (again!) with such novelty; one just needs to be clear about what it is one is doing.

Many people have been turned off by Whitehead’s use of the word “God.” Various scholars have argued that the entire concept can be eliminated from his metaphysics (along with his “eternal objects”) without any loss or problem. I have been personally asked why Whitehead simply didn’t use another word to cover the above mentioned issues. The Greek word “arché” (“αρχή”) could easily cover the ideas of rational order and creative advance. But here’s the thing: rumors to the contrary notwithstanding (and they are plentiful), Whitehead never used neologisms, and never used non-English words to convey his thoughts. So what other word than “God” was he supposed to use in these various metaphysical contexts?

(“Eternal objects” are essential as well to his system: this is the term Whitehead uses for pure relational structures of possibility and potentiality. They are “eternal” in the sense that temporal considerations do not enter into their consideration. You cannot do away with rational structure and possibility without doing away the the pretense of thought, never mind Whitehead’s philosophy.)

The ideas are difficult, and the terminology often obscure, but philosophy isn’t supposed to be easy. However, with the dominating influence of process theology in this country, getting people past their “atheist owies” around the G-word becomes much more difficult. And lets make no mistake here, people like Richard Dawkins and others have not improved matters by their self-righteous presumption to know all there is to know about religion (while knowing nothing at all about theology, much less philosophy) because they once watched five minutes of Jerry Falwell on the television. But understanding the abuses people have endured at the hands of religion is a responsibility as well. So making Whitehead’s philosophical concept of God accessible to everyone is a responsibility that all Whitehead scholars share – perhaps, especially, the process theologians who’ve only bothered to advance discussion of the theological ideas they have freely constructed on Whitehead’s philosophical concepts. (“Idea” stands to “concept” as “genera” to “species.” Whitehead’s discussion was much more specific than those wide-ranging generalizations that process theologians have since developed.)

So how about some of those specifically philosophical meanings?

Let’s go back to that biggie, the stuff covered by the dreaded G-word. People have occasionally tried to argue against the reality of the rational structure of the universe. They are pretty funny, twisting themselves into pretzels like that, since in order to argue for anything, one must first presuppose that rational structure. So the folks who try to make such an argument (various flavors of existentialists (not all) and certain religious fideists, for example) must take for granted that which they claim cannot possibly exist. Not the ideal strategy for making your case. That said, the hyperventilating hysterics attendant upon the philosophical usage of the G-word will continue to make it a problem that constantly needs to be re-explained.

Perhaps the most important thing that process philosophy brings to the party is a more coherent, more defensible theory of Nature. I capitalize the word deliberately, because Nature in the process sense includes robust theories of possibility and time, something that current science and naturalism thoroughly lack. Particularly at the cosmology end of physics, time is treated essentially (though arguably not identically) as a spatial dimension, in which all of time is already there. Brian Greene characterizes time as a “frozen river” in various writings. This is what is known as a Parmenidean block universe. In process philosophy, time is genuinely real and, for Whitehead, more basic than space. Temporality itself is (again, for Whitehead) not a primitive; time is a natural fact, not a metaphysical given. (Details can be found HERE.) But that natural fact is a genuinely evolving one, not a static reality that only the limits of our observational capacities prevents us from “seeing” in its “totality.”

On ethical matters, it is a little trickier to tease out a purely Whiteheadian response (though Hall has taken notable steps in this direction). Still, a few points are worth highlighting within a process philosophical perspective. First, ideals can be “real” (as in, genuine relational possibilities), without being fixed, existent “things.” Second, developing from the first, ideals can emerge as possibilities, change, and make different actualities concretely present. Thus, it arguably makes no sense to talk about a “right to privacy” or a “right to healthcare” prior to the 19th C., since the possibilities for invading the first or providing the second, in any large scale or meaningful form, simply did not exist. This last will be a topic for a later post.

Reading Between The Texts

01 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by Gary Herstein in Book Review, Process Philosophy, Whitehead

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book review, Process Philosophy, Whitehead

A review of The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1924–1925: Philosophical Presuppositions of Science, Edited by Paul A. Bogaard and Jason Bell. Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

One of the single greatest regrets of Whitehead scholars everywhere was Whitehead’s desire that all of his papers be burned after his death. His wife Evelyn dutifully fulfilled that wish, leaving the scholarly community with an enormous gap in its grasp of Whitehead’s thought, and the nature of its development over the years. Whitehead, for his part, wished for no such scholarly interpretations to be imposed upon his thought; his books, Whitehead believed, should be read and interpreted as they stood, with no “extraneous” materials being used to interpolate further ideas, “between the texts,” as it were, that were not already explicitly stated in those texts.Harvard Lectures 1

In one respect, Whitehead’s wish was not all that unreasonable: authors in general want their works to stand and be judged on their own, and not second guessed by readers using materials the author has specifically left out. There are, however, at least two problems with this desire. The first is that as soon as the work exceeds the complexity of a “Dick and Jane” story, the difficulties of interpretation amplify significantly. The second problem is that, regardless of the complexity of the work, the author’s wishes are always going to be ignored by scholars. And when the two problems are operating together, that scholarly interpolation will, unless it is anchored by some substantial body of secondary materials (such as that which Whitehead had burned), often enough run riot in untethered speculation. Continue reading →

Officially Available:

04 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by Gary Herstein in Logic, Mathematics, Mereology, Philosophy of Logic, Philosophy of Science, Process Philosophy, Process Theology, Whitehead

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Logic, Philosophy of Logic, philosophy of science, Process Philosophy, Whitehead

Now published and available for sale as either hardback or ebook:

quantum-of-explanation

Available at Amazon, or directly from Routledge.

In Praise of Unpopular Ideas

11 Saturday Mar 2017

Posted by Gary Herstein in Critical Thinking, Process Philosophy, Whitehead

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Critical Thinking, Process Philosophy, Whitehead

The title of this post came to be long before I had any idea what I was going to write. There is certainly no lack of great and genuinely classic arguments along this line, and I’ve no need or desire to do a rehashed book report on Mill’s On Liberty, or Milton’s Areopagitica. Still, with power canalizing everything it is able into predetermined forms, and the Butthurt Baby in Chief‘s unhinged ravings against the press, against President Obama, even (evidently) thundering at his own staff, saying something about “unpopular” ideas seemed not out of place. The challenge I decided to set before myself was to do so as a Whiteheadian.Abort_retry_fail

My previous post took a number of steps in that direction, including setting up some background on Whitehead’s mature metaphysics. And I’ll not revisit that argument here. Rather, I wish to expand upon it by entertaining some additional Whiteheadian notions, those of the role of error in the growth of meaning, and of the functions of reason in life. Mill talks of the positive value of error in the above referenced book, but his attitude is that such a role is primarily as a whetstone against which reason and truth can sharpen themselves. On the other hand, the trifold functions of reason (Whitehead’s book “singularized” the term to the Function of Reason) open up how the possibilities of meaning in the world creatively expand as we move beyond the shackles of mere existence into the full universe of possibility. That movement – that “creative advance” – involves a kind of “error,” in that what simply “is” must yield to that which only yet “might be.” And that “might be” will, almost invariably, start out by being unpopular. I’ll begin with The Function of Reason, as it is both the easier to explain and the founding (albeit implicit) principle behind Whitehead’s theory of the role of error. Continue reading →

The Accretion of Value

27 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by Gary Herstein in Ethics, Process Philosophy, Relationalism, Whitehead

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Ethics, Metaphysics, Process Philosophy, Whitehead

[Update below]

Whitehead’s philosophical work is not often viewed with an eye toward its contributions to ethical or political theory. David Hall’s work stands out as one of the better known exceptions to this rule, and Jude Jones’ study of Intensity in Whitehead’s thought has immediate applications in the area of ethics, though it is often viewed from a purely metaphysical angle. I thought it high time to bring a little Whitehead back into this nominally Whiteheadian blog, and current events have offered some examples of how this might be done. Obviously this won’t be anything even remotely approaching those mentioned works’ level of scholarship; indeed, I wish to say up front that anything I say here is simply a product of my own musing, and not to be attributed to anything Hall or Jones said (although, at this point, I can scarcely tell how much is my own thought, and how much I’ve just internalized from others’ work that it is now a part of my own fabric.) No small part of the problem is that, by the time you’ve explained Whitehead, you’ve no space or energy left to apply him to ethics. This is why this post will be some 200+ words longer than I otherwise aim for.magnetic-field

One thing that can be usefully set out right up front: Whitehead’s entire professional career, whether mathematical or philosophical, was dominated by two generic problems that can be usefully described as “the problem of space” and “the problem of the accretion of value.” This issues often overlapped for Whitehead. Thus, in his earliest major professional work, his Treatise on Universal Algebra (a mathematical work on logical forms of space), he devotes several paragraphs to the importance of good symbolism for efficient and unambiguous expression and use of concepts. This is a matter directly relevant to the accretion of value, because good symbolism is a value that accumulates with each gain in efficiency and clarity. In his works on education (widely acknowledged to by sympathetic with Dewey‘s) Whitehead uses ideas of mathematics pedagogy to advance claims about the nature and purpose of a liberal education, education being one of the primary means for the accretion of value. These examples by themselves are almost enough to (loosely) ground the case for a Whiteheadian ethics. But I want to add a few details and then (as mentioned) give a brief application. Details of my discussion can be found HERE. Continue reading →

The Quantum of Explanation (book)

17 Friday Feb 2017

Posted by Gary Herstein in Logic, naturalism, Philosophy of Logic, Philosophy of Science, Whitehead

≈ 2 Comments

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Philosophy of Logic, Process Philosophy, Process Theology, Science, Whitehead

Publication is almost upon us.

quantum-of-explanation

“The Quantum of Explanation advances a bold new theory of how explanation ought to be understood in philosophical and cosmological inquiries. Using a complete interpretation of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophical and mathematical writings and an interpretive structure that is essentially new, Auxier and Herstein argue that Whitehead has never been properly understood, nor has the depth and breadth of his contribution to the human search for knowledge been assimilated by his successors. This important book effectively applies Whitehead’s philosophy to problems in the interpretation of science, empirical knowledge, and nature. It develops a new account of philosophical naturalism that will contribute to the current naturalism debate in both Analytic and Continental philosophy. Auxier and Herstein also draw attention to some of the most important differences between the process theology tradition and Whitehead’s thought, arguing in favor of a Whiteheadian naturalism that is more or less independent of theological concerns. This book offers a clear and comprehensive introduction to Whitehead’s philosophy and is an essential resource for students and scholars interested in American philosophy, the philosophy of mathematics and physics, and issues associated with naturalism, explanation and radical empiricism.”

This author’s profile can be found HERE.

More information on the book can be found HERE.

Let’s just say I’m a little excited.

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“But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is, that it adds to interest.” – Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

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